JSON vs XML

[Anu Bhagat]

I am trying to make a decision for data transfer appraoch in a java application.
I am not sure if I should use JSON or XML.
Any comments will be useful.

Thanks in advance.

Anu Bhagat

[Ulf Dittmer]

"In" a Java application? What are the two ends of the transfer?

[Vishal Shaw]

Hi,

I think this might help you

Vishal

[kourosh parsa]

xml has a definition file which can be used to validate that your tags are correct.
Both the formats are well supported for parsing so I guess you can go with which ever, although in the industry, xml is often favored.

[Marcos Vidolin]

The approach will depend on what you want. In general I have used JSON because it's smaller and more readable than XML.
Just for note, Twitter and Foursquare left XML and started using exclusively JSON.

The following code snippets represents the same data:


JSON

{ "Student" : [ 
        { "name": "Maria", "grade": [ 8, 9, 7 ]  },
        { "name": "Peter", "grade": [ 10, 10, 9 ] } 
    ]
}

XML

<Students>
 <Student>
   <name>Maria</name>
   <grades>
     <grade>8</grade>
     <grade>9</grade>
     <grade>9</grade>
   </grades>
 </Student>
 <Student>
   <name>Peter</name>
   <grades>
     <grade>10</grade>
     <grade>10</grade>
     <grade>9</grade>
   </grades>
 </Student>
</Students>